Why do people fear level squish? [Discussion]

Dude im killing overtuned water elementals in classic 1k needles. Im fine bro.

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I think this could be done even with the 120 levels, but I would actually prefer for it to cap at 60 then build up again. I think instead of making a new Azerite system with gear specific talents they should just expand the talent system to include some of those. Like I imagine a DH talent adding their legion artifact power for example. There are plenty of talents made, taken away,and to add that they don’t actually need a squish to make levels feel meaningful again. They just need to add those back. Hell warlocks could even get Meta back. They’d just need to simply rename it as it’s significantly different than the DH version.

If they did this AND did a level squish correctly(Kept the power to solo old raids just the same if not better and such) I’d be pretty happy.

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What you don’t understand is that post-squish you would be spending the exact same amount of time and getting absolutely nothing.

Yes, I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying there are better solutions than the level squish. It will only serve as a pointless waste of dev time that could be better spent actually fixing the problems with the game.

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Who said anything about leveling 50 levels and not getting anything? Go back to talent trees, where you get a talent point every level past 10. Go back to trainers, where you need to get new ranks of abilities, instead of just getting it, and never needing to improve or worry about it again. Go back to glyphs with actual effects, not cosmetic ones. Create new things to keep gaining new things and upgrades of older things as you progress.

It isn’t the 120 levels that makes leveling in WoW godawful, it is the changes to leveling that did that.

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I play this game to get powerful not to get weaken. Also gaining a level will feel just as much of a grind as classic and I don’t want that.

You think anyone enjoys watching their big cries be 1000-2000?

Also time spent leveling won’t change. At all. When I level alts my psyche goes “whew got 20 levels done today after 3 hours” it will be “whew got 2 levels done after 3 hours”

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This literally doesn’t matter. No one. I mean literally no one off the top of their head knows how many hours each character they own has. They Know the level… but you’re trying to measure it with something no one literally cares or pays attention too.

I cant tell you what my /played on this character ive had since vanilla has but I know he is max level… I could tell you multiple levels of my multiple toons… do I know their /played… no because it is a metric that doesn’t matter.

I am talking about how on retail once you get level 70 you stop getting anything but talents every 15 levels.

Yes, and the people you said have ‘horrible ideas’ have all been saying to scrap that model.

Prior squishes have led to some wonkiness, that’s really the only reason I would be “against” it.

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The issue is, is they keep tacking on worthless levels to the game that these levels mean nothing except to gate people from content. Use to be I could go back to the last zone I leveled through, and at least feel powerful or some kind of accomplishment, but now the mobs ding with me thanks to the scaling system. My character’s level advancement past 100 no longer feels like they are growing or advancing as a character. Leveling in BFA we gained nothing for 10 levels of leveling. I get no new skill, talent, or anything that grows my character. What did I get? Gear that I could easily replace with some WQ and WFs. There is no accomplishment from any new levels - only another form of gating.

They really need to stop with the character levels post 120 (heck I would even be okay knocking back down to 100 and then grant 20 levels towards a new advancement), and consider an alternative for character advancement.

It just seems like a bandaid. A fix for now, but what about a few xpacks down the road when we’re creeping up on those levels again?

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As said, AT BEST it will change absolutely nothing except make numbers look smaller. On its own, everything else stays exactly the same, still the same gaps in power for the same length of time. That’s assuming Blizzard does it perfectly, and this team has proven incapable at coming anywhere close to that.

For a team that doesn’t even have enough dev time to make classes not garbage, wasting a ton of it on something with no net gain is mindboggling at best.

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The whole game would have to undergo a drastic change to leveling in general. It would effect everything from the basic stats of the player to the stats of each enemy to the stats of each piece of gear to etc. You’re asking them to rewrite everything. To go through the entire game and rewrite a major part of the game’s coding. In the end, it will still take as long to get to cap level as it would to 120.
In the end, despite the OP’s wanting to insult those of us who do not want a level squish by saying we fear it, my honest opinion is that it would not matter. It’s going to be the same grind to 60 (or whatever) as it is now to 120.

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No. Talent trees were mostly boring with a few interesting talents in there. But I can’t get excited over “Increase the damage of this spell by x%” for 3 ranks or whatever.

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It is the only metric that matters. If you don’t fix the time spent between gaining new abilities and talents then your “solution” is a complete failure and changes nothing. So again, it’s a waste of dev time that could be spent on actually improving the game.

Bottom line, is that anyone arguing for the squish is arguing against improving the game.

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I’m cool with a lvl squish, but it would require a complete overhaul of all the lvling zones to really work. One of the reasons people hate the lvling system now is a lack of worthwhile gear. The Undead starting area is a good example as you go through 3-4 gloves before you get a new one that really matters. I think a lvl squish would make this worse.

There is also the logistics of how you would do the actual squish itself. 120s are easy… you can squish them to 50-55 and call it good. But what about 107s, 97s, 82s, 75s, 63s, etc., etc., etc. You would have to come up a squish that makes sense without people feeling like they were cheated out of progress.

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I “fear” item level cutoffs since they can be bad now with a larger scale. Squishing this being pessimistic looks ugly.

BFA was the worst of this really. WHy I have spent a fair amount of gold just to skip things like weapons/shields/offhand/cloak/pants/trinkets. Since I have alt addiction…that’s a few items really lol.

Have your 116 now feeling weak once ilevel scaling has bit hard. go see the AH. See the 118 locked item. And go it be nice to have. And…its not even op stat wise. Pawn is not reporting it as a 10000% upgrade. Its a whopping 20%.

They squish this wrong and the 118 weapon to not hate life as much is placed in a scale that has it even longer to get.

I also “fear” the wasted dev time. As leveling changes that do not involve xp changes means nothing. they compress outland/northrend to just 10 levels but keep the same xp needs do not change xp accrual rates in some way to be better they will still drag.

Currently in northrend/outland you can at least say yay 1 more level. 1 less to go to till get out of here. Squished to 10 and every level ding will just be god awful longer and feel worse as I see it.

Mhm. I think some people are caught up in “Half the levels half the time” or “We will get abilities sooner!” But a squish (in itself) does not mean that. If it takes you 2 hours to get to level 20 to get skill x or if it takes you 2 hours to get to level 10 for skill x… it is still 2 hours. They have said NOTHING about reducing the actual time it takes. It’s an illusion of quicker (level 10 vs level 20) at best.

That said, I am not AGAINST it, just it’s not going to do what some seem to think (if they do it).

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You’re misunderstanding the point, then. Talent trees weren’t for “OMG, I GOT THIS COOL THING!” They were for giving players a sense of progression. Same as going to the class trainers to buy your spells, and see the new ranks of those spells that were coming up later. They gave you short term goals to work for, as you built your character to how you wanted them to be. That is what made every ding feel great, because you knew you had a talent point coming, and you probably had spells you needed to buy, and so on. You had something that you knew was there, each level, that you were working for and building on, rather than really flashy things every 15 levels.

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This is what I like about Classic. There are likely more things I don’t like about Classic… but I do enjoy the feel of character building.

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Many hate talent trees because rarely do you go down the tree completely because most optimized builds require more than one tree.

This system they at lease incorporate the passive stats and only abilities/improve abilities remain

K. But not factual.

So instead of seeing those numbers rise more quickly, you hide behind the well we will get new abilities faster, when that is incorrect. If it take me 5 levels to get one talent, changing it to a new system that gives me that same talent in 2 levels instead, yet requires the same amount of game play, in fact changes nothing.

To me all it does it make the slog seem longer without reward.

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